"Collaboration" Is Bullshit

The article draws a parallel between S.L.A. Marshall's WWII finding that only 15-20% of soldiers actually fired their weapons and the recurring 80/20 pattern in organizations, where a small fraction does most real work. It argues that the modern tech industry's response—an explosion of collaboration tools like Slack, Jira, Notion, and Teams—has created a simulation of collective engagement rather than genuine output. Transparency was confused with progress, and the proliferation of coordination software has buried knowledge workers in tool-switching instead of productive work.